The Power of Fate
by MLaw
Summary: Illya Kuryakin is the sole survivor of a mysterious illness that has taken the lives of an entire Bolivian village. Originally posted for the first PicFic Challenge of 2014 section7mfu, live journal. Pre-saga. The prompt was a photo of 4 squirrel monkeys...


Dozens of them lay writhing on the ground, men women and children moaning in pain. The sounds of their agony diminished as one by one they expired; their deaths granting them freedom from their suffering.

Yet there was one who lived, a certain blond agent from U.N.C.L.E. who remained in pain. Death it seemed had rejected him again.

Illya Kuryakin, though weak as a baby, rolled over to his stomach and began to crawl...His head was pounding and every joint in his body was screaming out in pain. His muscles felt as though he'd just run a marathon...no several marathons. he didn't know how long or how far he'd gone when there was the sound of helcopter blades cutting the air. H

In the glare of the sun he saw them...figures that looked like cosmonauts in their white uniforms and bubble shaped helmets and in his fevered stupor he thought he was dreaming, then reminded himself they were merely people clothed in bio-hazard suits. The Russian remembered he'd sent a distress signal from his communicator.

"Illya!" Napoleon Solo called, kneeling beside his partner.

"Thank God you're alive...come on buddy, we're getting you out of here." He put a surgical mask across his partner's nose and mouth, bundling up the Russian in a blanket, lifting the man like a feather and carrying him towards the chopper.

"I want tissue and blood samples from the deceased, as well as ones from the flora, water and soil," the American ordered the members of the Medical team, also dressed in protective clothing.

Solo got his partner settled on a gurney once inside the chopper and lowered around him was what looked like and oxygen tent, when it reality it was meant to isolate him.

"Naaaapoleon," Illya rasped, barely able to speak. "Food. Check the mon..." He passed out before he could finish. He was burning up with fever.

Solo shook his head in disbelief, thinking for a moment his parter wated eat? No..."

Days later the young Russian awoke, finding himself confined to the biohazard unit at U.N.C.L.E. Medical in Buenos Aires. He'd been running a dangerously high fever, his sclera were horribly red, a sign of hemmhoraging. His nose began to bleed slightly. That now was at least the worst of it as Illya was no longer vomiting blood. There were indicatioins of internal bleeding, and the doctors were relieved Illya presented no signs of neurological imparement.

Napoleon rose quickly from the chair he'd been sitting in, having been ordered to wear a surgical mask and glove just as a precaution, even though his partner was deemed no longer contagious.

"Hey buddy, how you feeling?"

Illya, too weak to answer, laid there just slowly blinking his blood-filled eyes.

"Okay, don't try to talk. I'm going to ask you a few questions," the dark haired American said, gently wiping his partner's face with a soft tissue…."You know the drill, blink once for yes, twice for no. That okay with you?"

Kuryakin blinked once.

"On the chopper you called out food but didn't finish. Were you trying to say monkeys…autopsies of the dead found small amounts of undigested monkey meat in their stomachs, but nothing else very revealing."

One blink.

"Bites?"

Two blinks.

"Dead monkeys?"

One blink, then two.

"Yes and no, how can that be?"

Illya managed to get out one word before coughing violently.

"Fooood!"

"As in you all ate monkey meat?"

This time Illya nodded.

"Oh joy, sounds delish," Napoleon grimaced. "The doctors said it was the most severe outbreak of viral hemorrhagic fever they've ever seen and a strain of which they've never encountered before. You were the sole survivor chum and unfortunately you're going to be a human pincushion until they get some answers as to why you didn't die."

The Russian gave a weak shrug as a response.

Ten days later Kuryakin was up and about looking more himself, other than being a little paler than usual. The whites of his eyes were now a lovely shade of pink.

The Medical research team along with R & D had developed a cure of sorts, having taken immune plasma from the Russian's blood. It would at least be at the ready should such an outbreak occur in the future as the anti-viral would be made available to the World Health Organization for distribution. Tests on captured specimines of the indigenous squirrel monkey revealed they were indeed the carriers, but Medical was lost as to why the monkey meat the villagers had eaten showed no signs of the virus. How is was transmitted was still a mystery.

Research had surmised this wasn't a natural occurance, since the strain of the virus had never been seen before, and that someone...presumably T.H.R.U.S.H. had interferered, making monkeys the hosts. What the feathered ones had not counted, it this was indeed of their making, was one was one skinny Russian U.N.C.L.E. agent being immune.

.

Solo and Kuryakin boarded the Command's private jet, carrying with them the anti-virus, and headed back to New York. The flight was quiet, with the Russian keeping mostly to himself, sleeping for a good part of the time.

Napoleon knew better, sensing his partner was in one of his instrospective and melancholy moods. The deaths of the people in the village hung over Illya like a pall, even though he knew none of what had happend was his fault. The loss of innocent lives always bothered both men, but it was the death of children that seemed to hit Illya hardest.

Still Solo had to say something rather than watch his best friend suffer.

"Tovarisch, you need to talk abou this...if you don't, you know they'll send you to psyche don't you? Wouldn't it be better talking to me than to them?"

Napoleon's question was given a wide blue-eyed stare with Illya blinking several times while an internal debate was seemingly going on in his head. He gave an audible sigh before he began to speak.

"When I was a child," he paused, no more like hesitated. "During the occupation of Kyiv by the Nazis, I hid in the ruins of the city fending for myself. Eventually I discovered other bespriorzi, how you say, umm... children who lived on the streets, some unwanted, though many orphaned by war."

Napoleon leaned forward, his interest piqued as it was very rare that Illya spoke of events from his past, much less his childhood.

"I helped them survive the winter, stealing food and teaching them how make fires and to fend for themselves...we even hunted down the packs of wild dogs who had hunted us." His eyes glazed over for a moment lost in his memories.

Illya shook himself free of whatever thought had made him drift, continuing on with his narrative.

"We survived the Russian winter only to be beset upon by the Germans as they swept through the city gathering the bespriorzi, taking all they found to a camp on the outskirts of the Kyiv. I watched those children die of exhaustion and starvation one by one. My best friend was murdered in one of the death vans after she had been impregnated by one of the soldiers. She was only ten years old."*

Illya covered his face with his hands as he let out an audible sob.

Napoleon reached out, daring to offer a comforting hand on the man's arm. "It wasn't your fault you know that."

"Nyet!" Illya sliced the air with his hand. "I should have protected them, they relied on me! Me!" He barked his answer to his partner.

"Right, a little boy should have been able to defeat the Nazis all by himself." Napoleon was trying to figure out where Illya was going with this.

"I should have been able to...you know, the people in the village. I should have known something was wrong. " Illya shaded his eyes with a trembling hand. "Why was I the one who survived...both as a child and now in Boliva? Can you tell me why? Why did those villagers...the children have to die?"

Napoleon realized what was going on in his friends head; it was survivors guilt. How many times had Illya Kuryakin lived while others died around him? He suspected it had been more than the man let on...

"I know you've decided that you're supposed to die every time we head out the door on assignment, but there for the grace of God...we both live. We carry on to fight the good fight, that's our lot in life until our maker does finally call us home. There are those who die around us, yes sometimes innocents...but we try to avoid their being hurt, yet still sometimes it happens. It's not our fault. Do you understand. We can't save everyone."

"Why can we not do that?" Illya slammed his fist on the arm rest of his seat.

"Stop it," Napoleon controlled his tone of voice, keeping it calm. "You need to stop tormenting yourself. Though we do save the world time and again, we aren't it's saviors, understand? You, my friend, are not personally responsible for everyone. We do out best to protect people, and that's all we can do. Sometime we fail...it's _going_ to happen."

Illya fell silent, turning his face away and looking out the widow, gazing at the billowing white clouds.

Napoleon knew it was time to throw in the towel. Illya Kuryakin was a stubborn man, perhaps the most tenacious man he'd ever known. Maybe he'd come around, maybe not. One never knew...like everything Kuryakin, the man remained a riddle wrapped within an enigma.

Days later, Alexander Waverly stood near one of the windows in his office, staring out at the U.N. Plaza not far from headquarters.

His number one and two agents were seated at the conference table waiting for their boss to speak.

"Gentlemen, we were lucky on this one, very lucky. If Mr. Kuryakin had not been immune to this insidious virus, we would have found ourselves in quite an untenable position."

"Not to mention we would have lost a particularly valuable Section II agent," Napoleon added with a wink, trying to lighten the moment.

"That, Mr. Solo, goes without saying, and Mr. Kuryakin it is good to have you back among us and in one piece. You've done an invaluable service to yet again to save the world...though we're still not quite sure this was the doing of T.H.R.U.S.H. or instead misdeeds of Mother Nature."

"Either way sir, it is good to be back," Illya chimed in, his mood apparently improved, "and as to it being T.H.R.U.S.H. or not; it would stand to reason they would come up with a plan to infect the food chain yet again. Did we not see them attempt to contaminate the wheat crops with a fungus in my homeland and nearly launch a war between the Soviet Union and the United States?"**

"Yes, quite Mr. Kuryakin," Waverly absentmindedly sucked on the mouthpiece of his pipe. "Quite indeed…still our feathered friends have not taken credit for the deaths in Boliva and there has been no chatter on their frequencies. I only hope it is not some other group yet unkown to us. Research has concluded this was a mutated form of the Machupo virus, the likes of which they've never seen before. You Mr. Kuryakin were most fortunate indeed to live to tell the tale, and that at least has given hope to future victims of this illness. In a way you are indirectly saving many more innocents than you could possibly imagine."

Napoleon nodded in agreement, watching as his partner stared into space and wondered what thoughts were going through the Russian's head. If Waverly's pronouncement didn't pull Illya's head into a better place...well, then what would? He didn't know if he could get Illya to talk again, but he was determined to try.

The man was his best friend after all, and it was the power of fate that had brought them together and it seemed that fate had a hand in keeping them both alive for now.

Napoleon made a promise to himself to continue his efforts to see that fate stayed on their side for as long as he could...

.

* ref "Beginnings"

* ref "The Neptune Affair"

note: this was inspired by an acutal outbreak of viral hemmorhagic fever that occured in Boliva in the 1960's, though I changed the source to squirrel monkeys.


End file.
